.com is 30 years old, is he old?

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March 15, 1985, was an ordinary day. If it had not been designated as the International Consumer Rights Protection Day in 1983, this day might not have been worth mentioning in the "This Day in History" column after the morning news program on city radio stations. However, considering the time difference between China and the United States, it is worth remembering for all Internet users that the .com domain name was put into use 30 years ago today.

Back then, computer manufacturer Symbolics registered the first .com domain name in history, Symbolics.com. To this day, this oldest .com suffix website is still accessible, but once you click on it, you will find that this website provides almost no valuable information, just like the lonely street scene displayed on the page. Symbolics is a company spun off from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, mainly designing and manufacturing Lisp computers, but by the late 1980s, the company was declining and is now just a shell company. The domain name was also acquired by a small investment group called XF.com in 2009, and its existence is more like a tourist attraction on the Internet.

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(Symbolics.com homepage)

In the whole year of 1985, only 5 companies registered the .com domain name. By 1987, this number had grown to 100. Among the first 100, there are some domain names and companies that we are familiar with:

Xerox.com, launched January 9, 1986

HP.com, launched March 3, 1986

IBM.com, launched March 19, 1986

Intel.com, launched on March 25, 1986

Adobe.com, launched November 17, 1986

Apple.com, launched on February 19, 1987

But this is not surprising, the Internet boomed after 1990, when the World Wide Web took shape, followed by a series of backbone websites on the Internet, including Microsoft.com in 1993, AOL.com and eBay.com in 1995, and Google.com in 1997. There are also Facebook.com, YouTube.com and Twitter.com in the 21st century.

VeriSign, a company that provides Internet infrastructure services, is responsible for handling .com and .net domain name resolution on the global Internet. It also operates intelligent infrastructure services. Through its hands, 117 million (some say 115 million) .com domain names have been registered so far. Five years ago, this number was 91 million. Now, on average, one .com domain name is registered every second. VeriSign CEO Jim Bidzos said: ".com means much more than a website address. Almost every international brand realizes that the .com domain name is the brand itself. 100% of Fortune 500 companies have their own online identity."

The number of 117 million domain names also means that it is difficult for new websites to find a satisfactory domain name nowadays. The .com domain name suffix has been deeply rooted in people's minds. Some domain names have become a valuable resource. Some large companies often spend a lot of money to buy domain names. For example, Xiaomi spent more than 20 million yuan to buy the domain name mi.com, and Qihoo 360 spent about 110 million yuan to buy the domain name 360.com. However, not every company is as rich as Xiaomi or 360. Most companies are powerless when facing the .com domain name.

With the scarcity and high price of .com domain name resources, many people have begun to turn their attention to other domain name suffixes. In addition to the domain names divided by country, such as .cn, .uk, and .us, domain names in specialized fields have also been paid attention to. For example, Google recently spent 25 million US dollars to buy the entire domain name resource of .app. Before that, domain names such as .tech and .buy were also bought by some giant companies at high prices. The international domain name allocation organization ICANN began to open up these *** domain name applications in May 2012. In addition to country suffixes, there are even .nyc suffixes prepared for the New York area and .dev for developers, which are highly targeted domain names.

Many people believe that the opening of these *** domain name applications will have a great impact on the .com market. Just as Ben Crawford, CEO of domain name registrar CentralNic, said: "The changes taking place on the Internet are having a profound and exciting impact. Just like in the past 30 years, the only drink was boiled water, and suddenly there was juice, champagne, salt soda, etc."

Needless to say, boiled water refers to the domain name suffix .com, while juice, champagne and salty soda refer to a variety of suffixes such as .tech and .buy.

However, Verisign, which relies on .com for its survival, does not think so. From a mathematical point of view, there are 10 to the 98th power of .com domain name resources, and the current usage of 117 million is only a very small part of this number. When I saw this number, I gave up counting how many zeros there were behind it.